The early August heat wave has various media pundits ringing the global warming alarm bells.

In addition to Western Canada, temperatures have been high in Quebec and Europe with wildfires in California. It all fits the narrative that this is what the future will look like if we don’t curb CO2 emissions.

If you don’t swallow this hook, line and sinker you’re labelled as a climate change denier, a stooge of big oil and big agriculture. However, this debate could use some perspective.

It’s hot, but in most cases heat records are not being broken. The hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada was at Yellow Grass, Sask. on July 5, 1937 when it hit 45 C. If you look at the high temperature records for each province and territory, most of them were set between 1920 and 1945.

The dire warnings over global warming started gaining traction in the 1980s. After the 1988 drought in Saskatchewan with terrible crop yields in most regions, it was easy to believe the climate was going to hell in a handbasket.

Since then, we’ve had some dry years, but we’ve also had many wet years in which flooded cropland was the biggest problem. Some years have been warm; others have not. Generally, it seems to be true that our winters aren’t as severe as they used to be, but every now and then we still hit some really cold months.

Rather than global warming, the term most often used is climate change, which is convenient because any anomaly fits the theory.

In this age of alternate facts, it’s difficult for the general public to know just how fast the climate is actually changing. Different scientists expound different numbers.

Based on some of the predictions from 10 and 20 years ago and the fact that CO2 emissions have continued to rise, we should all be facing climate chaos by now. Obviously, the ramifications were overstated.

Of course, the climate has always been changing. The real questions are how much of the change is caused by human activity and how much can we do about it.

If the worldwide climate was spiralling into extreme danger, you’d think crop yields would be dropping, food prices would be escalating and more people would be starving. The opposite is true.

It may be difficult to quantify weather conditions around the globe, but we have a pretty good handle on the yearly production of the major grains and oilseeds in most nations. Production has been rising at least as fast as the growth in population with surplus production many years.

This is a credit to modern farming practices, but it’s also an indicator that on a global scale the weather has not become unsuitable for agriculture.

As a farmer in southwest Saskatchewan, this isn’t a great year. It’s been dry and hot. Crop yields as well as prices are down. Many of my neighbours have had their crops destroyed by vicious hailstorms.

I could blame it on global warming or climate change, but it’s really no different than many of the years faced by my father or his father before that.

If some of the climate change models are correct, and that’s a big if, there will be winners and losers when it comes to agriculture. Many of these models show Canada as a big benefactor.

Reducing fossil fuel use is a worthy goal, but climate change activists are misguided. Blocking pipelines means more oil moving by rail which creates more emissions as well as increased safety concerns. For agriculture, it could mean a shortage of rail capacity to move grain to export position.

For farmers, climate change activists may be a bigger threat than climate change.

Kevin Hursh is an agrologist, journalist and farmer. He can be reached by email at kevin@hursh.ca or on Twitter @kevinhursh1.

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